How Immortalis Uses Absurdity to Conceal Brutality
In the shadowed realms of Morrigan Deep, where eternal dusk clings to the horizon like a shroud, the Immortalis wield absurdity as both blade and veil. Their world, a fractured expanse of feudal kingdoms and infernal bureaucracy, thrives on the grotesque interplay of horror and farce. Brutality is not merely inflicted; it is dressed in the garish motley of the jester, rendered palatable through layers of the ridiculous. This is no accident of character, but a deliberate architecture of control, where the laughable precedes the lethal, and the preposterous paves the path to perdition.
Consider the plague hats that descend upon Khepriarth, a gift to ‘all the gentlemen of the village’. The ensuing chaos, with men debating gentlemanly claims amid swarms of bees and the inexorable creep of fleas, spirals into communal graves where the infected, and the merely protesting, are interred alive. The lord’s ‘bee test’ for true gentility locks doors on the dying, and the material’s damp matrix of parasites becomes the absurd prelude to mass burial. What begins as a petty squabble over headwear culminates in soil-muffled screams, the brutality concealed beneath the farce of social pretension.
Nicolas DeSilva, proprietor of Corax Asylum, elevates this principle to art. His institution, a labyrinth of cells, mirrors, and clocks, masquerades as psychiatric care while functioning as a personal theatre of torment. Straps on beds, rusty scalpels on racks, and oversized wheelchairs strewn with the bound form the backdrop to his ‘treatments’. He trades tributes for a medical licence from Irkalla, declares the sane insane, and drives them to madness to validate his verdict. Cure is bad for business, he reasons, and cure is precisely what he avoids. The asylum’s washrooms spew sewage for inmates to bathe in, pre-cut to ensure infection, all under the guise of hygiene. Absurdity here is the very mortar binding the stones of cruelty: pointless speeches in the meeting hall, levitating chairs, and gramophones spinning rotting heads, all while the surgical instruments gleam with fresh use.
The Deep itself bends to this pattern. Top hats laced with plague, magnetic anchors slamming ships into wreckage, aardvarks gifted vampirism to devour the sands of Neferaten, mutant ants adapting to poison only to be met with worse. Each disruption, each engineered folly, masks the underlying savagery. The lord of Sapari’s bridge collapses under loosened bolts, courtesy of a lad suspiciously linked to Nicolas. Chaos ensues, carriages plunge, and the complainant finds his head among tomatoes. Rumours swirl, but proof evades, the brutality buried beneath the clownish incompetence.
Even the Immortalis embody this duality. Nicolas, in his orange silk or plaid monstrosities, dances to screeching violins while electricity surges through strapped inmates. His brother Theaten adjusts candles for perfect shadow, blessing meals of basted tribute with refined silver. Kane, primal shadow to Theaten’s nobility, drags kills to his bone cabin, trophies lining the walls. Behmor, king of Irkalla, lounges in silk while souls flay themselves at his command. Absurdity is their uniform: top hats taller than insolence warrants, chairs that spin, gramophones with heads. Beneath lies the unrelenting grind of flesh and will.
This is the genius of Immortalis rule. Brutality alone breeds rebellion; absurdity disarms it. The victim laughs at the levitating chair or the bee test, only to find the horror creeping in. The Deep’s thesapiens bury wives prematurely, lords complain of hats while villages burn, and Immolesses like Lucia stumble through halls of mirrors, their pleas drowned in violin shrieks. The Immortalis do not hide their savagery; they illuminate it with the flickering light of the ridiculous, ensuring the blade falls before the jest registers.
Yet in this carnival of cruelty, cracks appear. Allyra, the third Immoless, navigates the farce with eyes unclouded. She boils vampires for truths, resists mesmerism, and turns the wheel of torture upon the torturer. Her ascent, blood by blood, challenges the veil. Absurdity conceals brutality, but when the jester’s mask slips, the Immortalis stand revealed: not gods of chaos, but architects of a meticulously cruel order.
Immortalis Book One August 2026